8-Day Tanzania Photography Safari

Met at Kilimanjaro International and driven to Arusha Coffee Lodge, set among the rows of a working coffee estate. The evening is a proper working briefing rather than a welcome drink: your photography guide goes through your kit, talks through what you want from the week, and shows you the vehicle setup: bean bags, clear sight lines, and a roof that opens fully.

Get the housekeeping done tonight. Cards formatted, batteries charged, sensor checked, and a decision made about which body carries which lens. Changing glass in a moving vehicle at dawn with dust in the air is how sensors get ruined, so most people settle on a two-body setup and leave it that way for the week.

A morning drive south to Tarangire, arriving in time to be in the park for the afternoon. The first session works the river and the baobab country, and by late afternoon you are positioned for golden hour along the Tarangire River, where the elephant herds come down to drink with the low sun behind them.

Tarangire is the most graphically rewarding park on the circuit. Baobabs give you shape and scale nowhere else offers, the elephant herds are large enough to fill a frame properly, and the dust hanging in the air through the dry season is a gift, backlit at the end of the day it turns every herd into a silhouette study.

A full day working the park, out before first light and back after the sun has gone. The subjects are laid out for you: elephant at the river in early light, baobabs against the sunset, bee-eaters holding a branch long enough to be worth the long lens, and lilac-breasted rollers that will eventually take off in the right direction. An image review session follows in the evening.

The review is where the week actually pays off. Going through the day's take with a guide who knows both the animals and the camera is worth more than any amount of extra shooting. It is where you find out your shutter speed was too slow for the roller, or that you were framing too tight on the herd.

A long drive west through the Ngorongoro Highlands and down onto the Serengeti plains, the light changing completely as you descend. The afternoon session works the Seronera Valley, and the day finishes with golden hour positioning at a kopje or along the river.

Kopjes are the photographer's friend in the Serengeti. These granite outcrops give a lion or a cheetah somewhere elevated to sit, which means an animal against sky rather than against grass, a far stronger frame. Your guide will know which ones are currently held by which cats.

A full day built around predators: lion prides along the river, leopard in the sausage trees, and cheetah out on the open ground where they hunt in daylight. Where it is permitted the vehicle can be positioned off-track for the angle rather than settling for whatever the road offers. Image review again in the evening.

Predator photography is mostly waiting. A cheetah that is going to hunt will sit up, scan, and sit again for an hour before anything happens, and the job is to be set up, focused and at the right shutter speed before it does. Your guide reads the behaviour and will tell you when to stop shooting and start watching.

A second full day, deliberately pointed at different subjects: hippo pools, crocodile hauled out on the banks, and the birdlife most safari photographers ignore until they realise how good it is. There may also be the option of a private conservancy where vehicle density is low and off-road positioning is unrestricted.

Varying the subject is what turns a set of images into a portfolio. Everyone comes home with lion. Far fewer come home with a decent hippo yawn at the right angle, a saddle-billed stork in flight, or the texture of a crocodile's back in the hard midday light that would ruin a mammal shot.

A morning session before you leave the Serengeti, then the drive east and up onto the Ngorongoro rim. The afternoon is at leisure, with the option of a rim hike for landscape work, a genuine change of discipline after a week of long lenses and moving subjects.

The rim at 2,300 metres offers the one thing the plains do not: depth. Cloud pours over the edge in the late afternoon, the caldera floor falls away 600 metres below, and you finally have a reason to put the wide-angle on. Sunset from up here is the landscape frame of the whole trip.

An early descent to the crater floor for a half-day session, timed to get you down there in the good light and before the vehicles build up. The crater's density means subjects come quickly: lion, elephant, buffalo, hyena, flamingos on Lake Magadi, and black rhino if the morning goes your way. Picnic lunch by the hippo pool, then back to Arusha for a final review and farewell dinner.

The crater is a difficult place to photograph well precisely because there is so much in it. The discipline is to pick one subject and work it properly rather than firing at everything that appears. That last review session is a good moment to see whether a week of practice has changed how you shoot.